With the popularization of social software in the enterprise and on the public internet, individual users will have multiple identities that span their personal and professional life, and at times a single account spanning both worlds (e.g., some micro-blogging posts may be both personal and professional). An aspect of becoming a social business or social enterprise is to enable one's employees to best interact with public social tools such as social networking tools, micro-blogging tools and the like, via building connections. A reliance on communication, transparency, trust, and other characteristics of a personal network, or friends may be beneficial in forging a brand and engaging an audience.
Internal advocacy from one's employees out to the broader internet is an area that is often driven by individual leadership. These are often highly social and well connected employees. But this approach may break down as an organization reaches out to engage its broader employee base to effectively represent their brand with the most relevant set of information.
Connecting with external social networking accounts traditionally looks at how to pull data from the outside to inside, for instance, micro-blog updates of a user into the user's enterprise social network account. This type of integration may allow for more content on the enterprise's internal network, but does not help the enterprise's business to leverage social media to crowdsource external collaboration and reputation.